Eat A Free Peach: Mapping “Public Fruit”

This time last year, I found myself in a jungly Echo Park garden full of chickens, shared by David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young, three CalArts graduates who founded Fallen Fruit, a mini-collective that several years ago began mapping the “public fruit” of Los Angeles: the guavas, cactus, apples, bananas, figs, grapes, nectarines, peaches, plums, carob, persimmons, walnuts, passion fruit, pomegranates, avocados, lemons, limes, and oranges that either grow on or overhang public land. Avocado and citrus, planted by commercial growers a hundred years ago, long before the neighborhoods were built, still align to a grid. In areas settled by Chinese, they found loquats; where Mexicans lived, they found plantains and prickly pear cactuses (the fruit makes good jam).

They have since mapped numerous other cities, including San Francisco, Madrid, Malmo, Denver, Sherman Oaks, Christiania (where the hippies planted mulberry trees), and Cali, Colombia. The Venice Canals, where I am writing from, have loquats, lemons, and bananas, if I’m reading the key right. “The streets were unwalked,” Austin said. “People didn’t know the fruit was there.” Their first idea was to distribute maps to the homeless, but then, Matias said, they realized the homeless already knew where the fruit was—“what they needed was a meal not a fruit map.” They started showing neighborhood residents where the fruit was—this was before foraging had entered the public consciousness—and frequently encountered the question: “Is this edible?” “We’d be like, ‘Yeah, it’s a peach tree,’ ” Matias said.

In Los Angeles, David said, it’s not illegal to pick public fruit, but it is illegal to plant fruit on public land. Not so in Seattle, which has announced plans to build a “food forest” filled with fruit and nut trees, berries, and edible perennials. When it’s finished, it will be the largest such permaculture project in the country, seven acres of chestnuts, walnuts, mulberries, apples, berries, herbs, and vegetables, free for the taking. The idea is to create a self-sufficient, self-regulating, woodlands-like ecosystem to enable the humans who use it to be more self-sufficient, too. One of the project’s goals, as stated on its site, is to “Improve the security of our food supply.” This is a position statement, subtly worded: food is safest when grown close to home, and processed in home kitchens.

Matias gave me a jar of jam when I left the garden, made from passion fruit he picked in Maui and apricots found somewhere in Echo Park. I used to do this kind of thing, too—give jam to strangers—though I was in college and not quite sure what I was picking and unlikely to have had good canning technique. In other words: overconfident from having lived in the country as a kid, and highly irresponsible. Mathias was cool. I liked him. I took the jam, of course, which was in a worn-looking glass jar with the ingredients written in black Sharpie on the rusty lid, and never tasted it.